The Curse of Knowledge

[Originally published in my 100Stickmen Tech musings notebook. Before it was 100Stickmen Tech.]

The main cause of incomprehensible prose is the difficulty of imagining what it’s like for someone else not to know what you know. – Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style

From The Sense of Style:

The Curse of Knowledge: a difficulty in imagining what it is like for someone else not to know something that you know.

The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation of why good people write bad prose. It simply doesn’t occur to the writer that her readers don’t know what she knows—that they haven’t mastered the argot of her guild, can’t divine the missing steps that seem too obvious to mention, have no way to visualize a scene that to her is as clear as day. And so the writer doesn’t bother to explain the jargon, or spell out the logic, or supply the necessary detail.

Pinker’s Advice for writers and speakers on lifting the curse:

The key is to assume that your readers are as intelligent and sophisticated as you are, but that they happen not to know something you know.